So, you’ve been spending the past couple of months (or more) developing a new product/service/feature and you’re ready to let the world know. After all these efforts, all you want is your hard work to pay off and ensure the word spreads. How do you promote a new product or service and ensure it successfully reaches your target market?  

We’ve been through this process several times now and we’d like to share our learnings with you. Here are our recommended 5 easy steps to help you promote your new product, service or feature. 

1. Have a go-to-market strategy/plan 

A go-to-market strategy defines the general approach you and your team decide to take when bringing your creation to life. It’s a step-by-step process to help you successfully promote your new product by identifying: 

• The right target audience
• The market problem it solves
• The best way to position your product/service in the market

In this interesting article by Hubspot, you’ll find everything you need to know about building and implementing a successful go-to-market plan, plus some great examples to take inspiration from. 

Having a clear go-to-market plan is essential when launching a new product/service. You want to be sure you’re not chasing the wrong audience, reaching a market at the wrong moment in time or picking the wrong marketing channels. 

2. Focus on both inbound and outbound marketing

There are two ways to generate awareness and demand around a newly created product or service. 

• Inbound marketing: you let the customer find you through their searches. In this case, you want your new product/service to be visible when your prospective customers are searching for similar solutions or for answers to their questions. 

Your inbound marketing strategy can be both organic (think about SEO, organic social media, online reviews and news coverage) and/or paid (PPC, paid social and content syndication, etc.). 

• Outbound marketing: you approach the customer directly through targeted/cold outreach. For example, you can work on a list of existing leads and reach out to them to promote your new product. Cold-calling, direct mail, billboards, TV, radio, print advertising…these are all forms of outbound marketing. 

If you’re interested in exploring this a little further, these articles may be of use: Brand awareness: the first step into the purchase journey and Brand awareness: 6 tactics to ensure your small business is visible

3. Support prospective customers throughout their path to purchase

It’s important to think about the whole journey; from the moment a prospective customer learns about your business to the moment they finally convert into a customer. 

What’s your plan to guide them through this process? Once customers are aware of your new product/service/feature, they’ll start evaluating whether what you’re offering is a good fit for them or not. They’ll then decide if they want to buy your product/service/feature or head to one of your competitors. 

Depending on where your potential buyers are in this process, they may need different types of content and engagement levels from you. For example, someone in the evaluation phase will need more info about your product or service to understand how it compares to other options in the market. Plus they will also need to consider what added value they get from choosing your product or service specifically.

Content marketing is a key tactic to move customers down the marketing funnel. Blog posts, videos, case studies, ebooks, etc. can help you promote your new product or service and navigate the customer towards your desired outcome. 

4. Improve your pipeline conversion rates

Your go-to-market plan can be super-efficient, but if conversion rates are low, all your efforts have gone to waste. It’s extremely important to track your pipeline conversion rates to ensure people are actually moving down the marketing funnel and buying your products/services. So, how can you improve conversion rates? These are only 3 ideas out of the many options available to you: 

1. Be sure to have a clear and user-friendly website that’s easy to navigate and has all the right call-to-actions in place. 
2. Improve the quality of your leads with tailored content and ads. 
3. Find ways to incentivise your sales colleagues to close new deals.

5. Assess and shorten your sales cycle

How long does it take your customer to go from initial contact to the actual purchase? Remember that time is money, so keeping this process nice and short will help you increase your ROI. 

Here at Saltoria we’ve tried many things and tweaked our onboarding process quite a few times! Over the past two years, we’ve worked towards shortening the sales cycle by: 

• Streamlining the onboarding process
• Using technology and automation to speed up things
• Focusing on the leads that are more likely to buy

In conclusion, launching and promoting a new product/service/feature is always a challenge! Be patient and don’t expect instant success. It’s important to continue the hard work after you launch. Realising and implementing these tips will help you reach your target market and give you a greater chance of success. Good luck!